Can you fix Weapon Ranges?

[Kael90]

Especially in EARLY GAME it is a pain in the A**.
If you dont want to play 'cheesy' - like getting a bow and play like 'a real knight' or something similar. The game starts to be extremly hard. Looters are the hardest enemy i encountered in this game.

And i think - they are just hard because some settings arent correctly setup.
If you would give Spears the range they should suppose to have, that wouldnt be an issue, you could pick them off.

Also: Weapons, like Stones do too much dmg. The Issue is: If you would wear IRL a metal helmet and you get a stone against it. You would just have a Scratch on that metal. Here you still get like 10 DMG from a regular stone when you are wearing a helmet.

So this is something which really should need to change.

Also that some ranges from these Looter-Weapons has more reach then like a spear, is very strange for me. I often (and i mostly have this in arena battles and looters) - i just cant get the feeling gone that something is wrong with the ranges. And when i sit on a horse and the shoulder or neck of my character got hit, when i stabbed a looter with my spear - it really just undermines my feeling that something there is wrong.

So - please do something about this.

 

[Yuri2001]

Physical regional damage has always been dodgy/approximative, in Warband and in Bannerlord. I suppose the devs want it like that, it's not realistic combat.

Same with the shields, their covering area is an invisible veil that you can't really guess. If you try to aim the legs or even foot of a sturgian spearman while he has his round shield on top of his head you have 80% chance of your thrust boucing on...the shield

RBM mod improves this a little bit but shield and armor coverage are just some weird tweaks calculations and not wht you see on your screen.
It's a bit of a shame because there's little incentive to carry a heavy (supposedly) full covering pavise if the tiny eastern round shield covers pretty as much.

As for the looters, they are by design hard to kill in the very beginning of the game (Warband was like this and I think I like it that way). But if you learn how to fight in the game and count on your tactics skill (the ones in your brain, not the perk branch) and your mates you will quickly crush them like butter. (and normally you don't have access to a steel helmet at this early stage until you managed to kill sea bandits, wich are a tougher kind of looters).

Also ask riot police officer what a stone thrown at your head feels like while you're wearing an helmet...it's not fun at all

 

[JunKeteer]

It's because there's no counter to the swarm mechanic or 'fear for life' - good armor sort of compensates for that (slightly) later on. Early tier troops, it's mainly just a numbers thing, if you don't want to deal with replenishing all the time (early game when income is low), range is key and tons more efficient; given you don't have to 'buy' arrows after each fight.

 

[Totalgarbage]

While I think the damage from head and neck hits (as well as the baseline damage of javelin-like throwables) definitely needs to be decreased a bit, I like the fact that looters are tier 1,5 units. What I don't like about looters is how common they are compared to other bandit types (and that we don't have roaming deserter and manhunter parties on the map). I would also like to see looters or thugs (maybe looters could be the tier 1 thug troop even) upgrade to bandit shock troops; troops with 2 handed weapons or swingable polearms.

 

[Overestimated]

There are a couple things you can do, you are able to smith weapons later on when you unlock parts and get more skill you can build longer weapons if you want more range. You can also use banners to either decrease melee or ranged damage.

If you are trying to fight looters in the beginning of the game as a knight on bannerlord difficutly the key is to use a lance on horseback and have a sword and a shield. Raise your shield when they throw the rocks and then charge them with your lance. If you are fight a looter with a pitchfork it is better to dismount and fight them with your sword or only lance them if they are distracted. For looters with swords or plows you can lance them but you have to be very careful and time it well, it is very risky to try to lance them with a new character without armor.

If you get high tier weapons and about 40-50 armor all around and hp boosting perks, you will find cut damage attacks will do almost next to no damage to you and pierce and blunt will do far less. You can even fight on foot if you invest into atheltics.

You could change difficult damage presets or use a mod like rbm, overall I think there are enough things you can do in the base game to reduce the damage if you are willing to spend more focus/attribute points on it which you should do if you want to rp a knight as they are well trained.

When I rp a knight playthrough early game, I mainly just do tournaments, get denars to get married until you get good armor but even without that if you want to kill 10-20 like you can without a bow or horse it is far more difficult but here is a general way to do it.

1. Wait until the looters use up all their rocks and lead them away from the rocks or lance the looters that have rocks by separating them.
2. Lance short weapon looters or those seperated form formation.
3. Dismount and drop everything except for spear and shield
4. Hit and run with the spear (get combat movement speed perks)
5. Use terrain and jumps (ie. jumping over fences/structures/ bridges to create distance, this allows you to spear the looters from the other side of a fence while they walk around)

Generally this is very hard to do even if you are a good player, it is just not realistic to consistently beat scores of looters without high skills or armor melee, biggest thing is just being really mobile and having a shield. If you had 300 athletics and a long spear and shield even without armor you could just run around shielding or dodging the stones and spearing all the looters, or you could just get armor and a 2h axe and quickly cut them all down and take around 20 damage that can heal with medicine perks after battle.

 

[Kael90]

@Overestimated
I would like that the charge with a lance work. But it doesnt. In Early-Game you have a Spear with like 1.80 in length. But because HOW your character holds it (like near the middle of it) - your 'effective' range is more like, maximal 1m.
So your Spear is more into 'one handed range'.
Even when, on your attack you 'put your arm forward' you maybe reach around 1.50m - And then your arm is exposed and - the AI tend to hit your hand then, which counts as shoulder (not arm hit) sometimes and give you like 80-100 dmg.

In reality - If you have a Spear with 1.80m length on horse, you grab in the part behind. So you get around 1.40m or more in total length.

Also if you have 300 athletics - this is a lategame state after hours of gameplay. But in Early Game its nearly impossible to beat around 5 to 8 looters - just because they throw stones at you, and even when just 5 hit you, 50% of your health is gone. 1 more hit and you are down. This could simply be fixed if you gave spear the 'real range' and make the beginning far more playable, if you dont want to start with a bow.

@Yuri2001​

Also here: In Warband i havent a problem with looters because the Spears have, compared to the looters weapon, a well rounded range.
Also a thing: modern police riot equipment arent compareable to medieval full armor. In HEMA you get hits with polearms like halberds on your head and you still keep fighting. Same with a Stone thrown at you.

 

[Brano]

If you are on PC, you can easily edit weapons loadout of looters in bandits.xml file. You can even remove the stones if they are a nuisance for you. IIRC they will always leave at least blunt damage which is kind of OK.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

Yeah these complaints have been coming up all of EA, I don't know why TW is so stubborn about it. You just want the player to always take damage from stones that THE WEAKEST UNITS can throw with more accuracy then actual troops with throwing skill throw their real weapons? They want spears to suck, they don't mind in Cav AI can barely use lances, side arms are all too short for the Cav to use, only swinging pole arms work well mounted and somehow hit like a truck.

 

[Brano]

Yep. All you've said. Sometimes I think that originally looters were supposed to have slings. But then devs decided it's "too complicated" and made them a hardened baseball pitchers